Pink and gelatinous and topped with a great cardboard-and-felt monstrous head measuring a half-metre in diameter, the costumes were pretty magnificent. I had planned ahead and thought to wear only gym shorts and a t-shirt, and thus my wretched porcine swaddling was not quite so torturous as it might have been. Even still, as we waddled down the hall, unable to walk astride because of the width of our encasements, the bulk and claustrophobia started to feel like a sauna buried deep below the earth.

We wandered into the library, where our children had been deposited minutes before. The librarian had read them the 3 Little Pigs, and we were those pigs, having recently fallen out of our storybook, concussed and bewildered and unsure of our connection to one another. Shrieks of joy assaulted us as we approached. Some tried desperately to figure out who was trapped within each piggy of lupine disguise, while others were just willing to go with it and accept the magic.

The studied among you may have gleaned that my writing is sparse, laboured, and frighteningly irregular lately. Alas I have faltered in my daily writing goals, those regulated flows of verbiage that I feel help to calm the raging flatulence and oh-look-a-pretty-sparkly-thing distractions of my weary being. I often feel like these words are my steam valve, the coal exhaust of keeping the engine of my heart working each day.

But sometimes even the exhaust gets exhausted, most particularly when real life intervenes. Some of you may recall that I am now a gainfully employed person. Thought my demeanour and usual writing topics may imply that I am shiftless bon-vivant surviving on nothing but smiles and summer wine, I do actually work for a living, and we are rapidly approaching the end of the year.

The end of year: a time of tumult and assessment and grading. A time when the students get used to the phrase “please be independent” as I call over this or that child to add or count or read or tell me their thoughts on inventions. A time of murky, sticky hot summer days that stretch out into forever. A time for dreaming of an ice cream truck. A time of goodbye, a time of preparation, a time of reflection. A time when the children shake like unbound electrons, barely contained within four walls, so prepared are they for Grade 2, for summer, for all the sunshine and freedom they can possibly imagine.

For many years, my grandfather would constantly tell me, “That’s one thing they can never take away from you. Your education.” I never asked who they were, although the way he said it implied that they were very intent on taking anything and everything else, and that also maybe they were waiting just outside. And if they were the kind of people who wanted to mug me, that maybe they would also take a bat to my head and there goes my education.

But I got his point.

My grandfather was an exceedingly generous man, and as his only grandson he was endlessly proud of everything I did and every dumb thing I ever said. I think, sometimes, that this statement was meant to be reassuring to me through my university years and the ones just beyond. The years where I realized that I had studied a lot of things that weren’t going to be terribly useful to life or gaining a career. The years where I started to get a little academic’s remorse, as I considered my future and how the words “Starbucks barrista” fit into it.This statement was meant to encourage me to find my education fulfilling, as I would surely be sustaining myself on a pulpy milkshake I could make from old manuscripts and printer ink.

The painter once had fourth grade teacher who had to listen to some very long, very odd stories.

Adele had been weird for a very long time.

I remember our early years of school together vaguely, a hodge-podge rough sketch of interactions and moderately blurry vignettes. I recall that she often smelled like cauliflower, that even as a small child she dressed like an elderly Russian grandmother upon whom all the miseries of mankind weighed, and that she had the teeth of a velociraptor. Adele would often sit in class beside me as a grade two and cut her own hair with safety scissors, her bewildering smile peering out from behind her lips as locks of her long, stringy black hair fell to the desk around her and I slowly cringed away, even embarrassed as a seven-year-old.

My real understanding that Adele was pretty weird came in high school, when she would regularly claim to be a 400-year-old witch who knew jujitsu. Whether this was simply a teenager’s way of clawing at some semblance of identity and attention or an actual omen of burgeoning schizophrenia was always unclear. But as a bored teenager with little else to do, listening to her stories (which included midnight knife-fights, tales of miraculous healing, and regularly battling the shadow minions of her witch-nemesis, Naomi) provided boundless entertainment.

Adele was, of course, a social pariah except for the outskirts of a few loosely-bound cliques. She orbited the outer strata of some of the nerds or the burn-outs or the goths, who were slowly transitioning into becoming emos, as was the style at the time. As an obnoxious, awkward weirdo myself, the tangents of our social lives would often briefly cross like two confusing comets in the night sky, and I would marvel that there was someone at our school so obviously less normal than I was.

While I am on the road, I thought I would share with you a few snippets from life as of late, both in China in general and in particular in the wild world of teaching Grade One.

My contribution was paper-and-popsicle-stick medal of courage.

Did we talk about Halloween at all? Timed just before Halloween, my school held Book Week, which we all took Very Seriously. As was apparently tradition, our team needed to dress up in a theme, which meant a story with six decent characters that would allow for costuming. Our Wizard of Oz crew looked pretty stunning, mostly through the careful, thoughtful work of other people. A speedy seamstress stitched together my custom lion onesie for the equivalent of 45 Canadian dollars. One of our ESL teachers followed me around outside smearing untold amounts of paint across my face. Another teacher invited me into the studio he set up in his classroom to shoot my get-up in full glory. Continue reading →

My bank of photos has very little appropriate material. Please enjoy this image of cups of yellow fluid (it’s not pee).

I have always been a bit of a master at not peeing.

The origins of my particular talent lie, I think, within my high school days, a bildungsroman of ureic fortitude. My high school – feculent, dilapidated, filled with drug dealers and vagabonds and scores of teenagers so devoid of vigour and care that we could have doubled as a coma ward. Ceiling tiles regularly leaked litres of aged rainwater onto the floors; whole window panes would be thrown into the courtyard and replaced with wedges of cardboard for months at a time. Of the various school apparatus that had fallen into disrepair, the bathrooms were always the worst.

The bathrooms: acrid, fetid pustules with such dense bioform growth and new bacteria that they could technically be classified as wetlands. Whenever I walked by a bathroom the ambient stench was so powerful that my eyes began to water and my teeth developed cavities. The pages on my books fused together, students’ hair turned white, and car tires would deflate. There were no stall doors and every urinal was constantly caked in feces. When they weren’t designated hot boxes for impromptu circles of red-eyed wastoids, they were assumed to be full of various other illegal activities, from prostitution to thievery to orphan smuggling to the exchange of blood diamonds. People entered the bathrooms and just never returned, sucked into sewagey hell dimensions beyond our mortal comprehension.

I remember standing upon the threshold one day as a freshman and deciding, quite simply, that I would hold it. And held it I did. For 4 years.

Smoglife is a series of vignettes relating to various things that happen when the air in China gets mad murky.

The smog in Suzhou had settled like an unruly houseguest, and was eating all of the good chips and cookies and never making the bed. The air began to taste sulphurous and metallic, always with the tinge of carcinogen and burning computer parts. People would squint to make out objects in the middle distance and try to not think about the weeks and years slowly being peeled off the end of their lives with a China-shaped paring knife.

One of the side-effects of this acidic haze was the necessity for indoor play. Much as throwing children directly into a volcano or a sewage pipe would be seen as inadvisable to their health, it was deemed inappropriate to allow our various charges to careen about in the toxic slurry that we were all conspiring to call air. Their tiny, fragile lungs being susceptible as they are to incredibly hazardous levels of choking coal smoke and industrial chemicals, it was thought that for their safety, the children should stay inside on a smoggy day.

At first all was well. A day of indoor play is an excuse to unearth old toys, different parts of the classroom and the school left unexplored. It is reason to connect with new friends, with old chums, with new games and with creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention; boundary is the foundation of innovation.

But in time, the confines proved too constricting. In time, indoor play drove the children to extremes.